


No Such Thing as an Endless Highway

by pollinia



Category: All For the Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Americana, M/M, Road Trips, we still never talk sometimes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-23
Updated: 2016-04-23
Packaged: 2018-06-03 23:49:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6632011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pollinia/pseuds/pollinia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Outside of Knoxville, Andrew pulls over at a small, colorful roadside stand, buys a frankly obscene amount of fireworks, and they're back on the road before Neil fully wakes up. He sleeps through the rest of their sharply diagonal, north-bound route through Tennessee. Cigarette smoke is a soft cocoon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Such Thing as an Endless Highway

Neil and Andrew buried family on both coasts. Neil had only memories of blood in Washington, and Oregon was a transitory terrain of fear and grief at best, and of course there's Maryland, so they stick to the safer territory at the interior of the country. Neither of them care for sand anyway.

They drive endlessly, it seems, Neil dozing in the passenger seat. Andrew weaves viciously around slower traffic until they hit the long stretches of highway out of the city. Then, cars become spaced out, sparser, until they fall away altogether. Neil thinks of his mother. They didn't always have a car while they were on the run, but when they did, she would play the radio at a volume where its sound was almost lost beneath the hum of tires, the firing of the engine. Neil would strain to hear the words.

Andrew keeps the drive silent; he only seems to play music when he is visibly angry. Here, he wavers between boredom and calm. The gritty sound of the road is a pleasing backdrop as Neil slips in and out of consciousness.

Outside of Knoxville, Andrew pulls over at a small, colorful roadside stand, buys a frankly obscene amount of fireworks, and they're back on the road before Neil fully wakes up. He sleeps through the rest of their sharply diagonal, north-bound route through Tennessee. Cigarette smoke is a soft cocoon.

The next time he wakes up, Andrew is climbing back into the car and slamming the door. He smells like gasoline and it is the smell more than the sound that jerks Neil into alertness. The taste of burning hair sticks to his throat.

Andrew takes one lingering look at him and whatever he sees on Neil's face makes him start the car up, pull back onto the highway, and say, "You have a boat, and you need to take a fox, a chicken, and some corn across a river--"

"First take the chicken, then the--"

"Wrong. Let the fox eat the stupid chicken."

Neil turns his head and smiles against the cool window, panic not gone but swallowed down deep enough for him to breathe.

Darkness falls outside of Bowling Green, Kentucky, and Andrew pulls over to the side of the road. He fixes a stare on Neil before getting out, knowing that Neil will follow. Neil watches him watch the sky, the sharp blackness, the stars littered across it, cigarette burns marring the smooth surface. He thinks about ruined skin and survival.

Without speaking, Andrew opens the back door and crawls onto the backseat, stretching out. Neil's breath catches in his chest. His body remembers the stiff discomfort of the road between California and Millport. He would break into cars and sleep in the back, slipping out unseen before dawn. He can't remember if Andrew knows this, if he told him. But Andrew lies there, looking at him expectantly, so Neil steadies his breath and slips in beside him. He has to angle himself awkwardly to avoid pressing his weight against Andrew, but they manage.

His heart hammers too hard for too many hours for him to fall asleep. But before Andrew's breath evens out, Neil can feel the firm heat of fingertips on his ribcage, holding him steady.

By midday, it is Springfield, Missouri, and Andrew presses him to a wall inside a rest stop bathroom, buries his palms under Neil's shirt, takes him apart with lips and tongue and teeth. Neil thinks maybe they haven't spoken for three states-- _four? Did they pass through the corner of Kentucky?_ \--and everything feels like it should.

A sharp southern turn betrays Andrew's lack of a plan. Neil doesn't mind. Oklahoma is a quiet landscape of sculpted rock and streaks of color and shimmering heat that rises from long, straight highways. They eat greasy gas station food unless they stop for drive-thru. Neil watches vultures circling and circling.

When night swallows the road just over the Texas border, Andrew pulls over. The stretch of highway is abandoned. Neil can see for maybe thirty miles in either direction, though the darkness makes it hard to tell.

They get out again, but instead of bedding down in the backseat, Andrew has two cigarettes lit before Neil comes around to the driver's side, and they stand in silence, surrounded by soft wisps of smoke, staring out as if they can still see any of the desert.

Andrew's cigarette burns down to the filter and Neil can't remember seeing him take a single drag. He watches the cherry fall through the darkness and land on the asphalt. He hears the scrape of Andrew's heel as he grinds it out. By now, his eyes have adjusted, but it's still a surprise to feel a palm against his throat, two fingertips pressed to his pulse point.

"Yes or no?" is a fragile tendril of a question in the desert quiet and Neil answers, "Yes," and Andrew is kissing him. It's too tender to be real, almost too tender to be wanted, but Neil does want it. He wants it desperately and he keeps his palms flat against the car door until Andrew says, "Shoulders," and then he touches his fill.

Neil's skin flinches at each point of rough, heated contact, but by now it isn't new and it isn't unwelcome and Andrew unbuckles Neil's belt, shoves stiff denim lower on his hips and brings him off with a distinct lack of the earlier gentleness. Darkness is blindness, and blindness is safety, so Neil isn't surprised to hear Andrew's staggered breath afterward, and Neil kisses him through his own orgasm.

Later, they sit in the gravel on the passenger side, their backs against the cool car doors. Cigarettes, a bottle of vodka Andrew dragged out of the trunk, and Neil is startled to remember how cold the desert gets at night.

They hadn't discussed a destination, but Andrew's voice cuts through the quiet. It is rough from disuse when he says, "We could go all the way to California."

Neil swallows panic, swallows vodka, and leans his head back against the car.

"We could," he says.

They sit quiet again until Andrew gets up to unload the crate of fireworks from the trunk. Neil stays by the car as Andrew drags them a safe distance away.

He lights them one by one. Each one sends sizzling streaks of light across the sky, a shower of sparks, color, heat. Some linger lower, hissing and spitting; incendiary rattlesnakes. Neil's heartbeat speeds up, anticipating each explosion, the rumble vibrating up through his body, a physical sensation in his bones.

And beneath the flickering strobe, Andrew. His face lights up in alternating red and green and white, and despite his small frame, Neil has never seen him look truly young before. The light from the fireworks erases the dark circles, the lines of worry around his mouth; it lends the illusion of an easy life and if Neil could keep one thing forever it would be this.

After the last rocket goes dark and quiet, Andrew joins him back at the car. Neil can feel his body heat across the inches between them until Andrew leans to the side, bringing their shoulders together, and then the heat soaks directly into his skin. Somehow, he keeps his breath steady when Andrew's hand slides under his own, their fingers tangling lightly. Lips on his jawline are harder to ignore.

They stop short of Arizona. They leave the ghosts buried. By Wichita, Andrew switches on the radio. It is loud enough for Neil to hear the words, even if he doesn't know them.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Title from Chris Pureka's song, "Betting on the Races." Come say hi on tumblr: [polliniaa](http://polliniaa.tumblr.com)


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